Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  However, the atmosphere in the family home was not always happy, in large part because Hilda was homesick for South Africa, or, as Vera put it in her Home Office interview, “my mother did not settle well” in Romania. Hilda nevertheless did her utmost to ensure all the “Englishness” she had absorbed in colonial Cape Town and on her visits to London was maintained, and English was the first language the children learned. Indeed, though French culture dominated much of Romania, Englishness was the height of fashion in cosmopolitan circles before the First World War, especially after the arrival of the much-loved Queen Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who married King Ferdinand of Romania in 1893 and imposed her own very English style on the country's royal court.

  The Rosenberg family's entrée into the highest echelons of Romanian society came about also through their close connections with the Mendl family, one of the most prominent Jewish families in Braila. The Mendls, originally from Trieste, also had strong ties with England.

  Perhaps during a visit to see her sister in Galatz, May Atkins, Hilda's elegant younger sister, met Anthony Mendl, a wealthy businessman. Anthony and May were married in London, and soon afterwards Nina Mendl, a cousin of Anthony's, married Max's brother Arthur.

  Teresina Mendl, another cousin of Anthony's, whom I met in Paris just a few days before her hundredth birthday, recalled with a smile “la vie coloniale” that they all enjoyed in the Danube ports at this time. “We all had big houses, we had servants.”

  The rich, especially German-speaking Jews, looked to Vienna for culture and entertainment. “In Vienna,” Teresina told me, “they went shopping, consulted the renowned specialists, had check-ups and cures. They enjoyed Viennese operettas and great opera singers. From Vienna they ordered their furniture and brought the latest style in embroidered tablecloths and so on.”

  In those days, Teresina said, the young men might be educated abroad—perhaps in England. Vera's elder brother, Ralph, was sent to an English prep school as soon as he was old enough. But the girls were educated at home and never went out unchaperoned. So Vera, by the age of six or seven, would have had a governess who accompanied her at all times.

  Teresina then revealed that she remembered Vera as a tiny girl. “Elle était un enfant très tranquil. Très reposé. Toujours calm. C'est tout.”

  How far the Rosenberg children were made aware of their Jewishness in these early years remains unclear. Siegfried had written that in Kassel the family observed Jewish rituals and holidays but were not ultrareli-gious and were quite opposed to the Zionist movement of the time. “Although we were Jewish with Jewish beliefs, we felt German.” Certainly Max and Hilda's young family would not have been brought up as devout Jews, but Teresina said they would probably have observed the Jewish Sabbath and attended synagogue on high days and holidays.

  Anti-Semitism, though not at that time a serious concern to upper-class Jews in Romania, was clearly prevalent enough to persuade a man like Max Rosenberg that it made sense to emphasise his German rather than his Jewish origins. To be German in Romania in those days was to be highly respected.

  Jews of their standing had little to do with lower-class Jews, said Teresina. Would they have been accepted by the elite in Romanian society? “Acceptance in Romanian society was certainly possible,” she said, “though not automatic.” As time went by, and certainly between the wars, Hilda let those around her begin to question whether she was a Jew at all. It was said that she had once converted to Catholicism but immediately suffered a leg injury and, taking this as a punishment from on high for deserting her faith, converted straight back. Hilda was remembered as a simple soul, “somewhat childlike,” in Teresina's words. Teresina Mendl was one of only two people I found who had any memory at all of Vera's father. Like Vera, Max was “very calm,” she recalled.

  By 1910 the Rosenberg business was growing fast. The German headquarters of Gebrüder Rosenberg Handlung had moved from Kassel to Cologne, from where Simeon Rosenberg that year sent a postcard to his grandchildren, “Lieber Vera und Ralph,” showing a photograph of the family's new apartment on one of the city's most fashionable rings.

  Also that year the Rosenbergs and the Mendls cemented their business partnership by forming a global shipping company called Dunarea, which was notarised in London. The company had a fleet of vessels, and among its eight dredgers was one named Vera, which busily plied the Danube clearing silt.

  In 1911, the year when Vera's brother Wilfred was born, the family's prospects continued to look excellent. The little Rosenbergs had new cousins now to play with: Nina Rosenberg gave birth to twin boys, George and Hans, and also in 1911, Cousin Fritz was born, in that same house in Domneasca Street. The very young Rosenbergs and their cousins were now raised together in Braila and Galatz in a rarefied atmosphere, rocked on verandas to the sound of clinking china teacups and pushed along the Danube by nannies in starched pinafores, who, in the case of Vera, Wilfred, and Ralph, would certainly have been English.

  Meanwhile Max Rosenberg, who had already fought his way back from bankruptcy, had become one of wealthiest Jewish businessmen on the Danube.

  In 1910 Galatz had eighteen synagogues and a yeshiva, or Talmudic college. At the back of wasteland on the edge of the Jewish quarter, we found the only remaining synagogue, surrounded by iron bars. Mr. Gold-enberg, president of the Jewish community, was in his adjoining office and willingly heaved hefty volumes onto his desk to scan lists for the name Rosenberg. He looked through Jewish burial records and a tome listing Jews transported from Galatz to Transnistra, territory in Russia, occupied by Romanian and German forces in 1941, where Romanian Jews were worked to death in labour camps. There were Rosenbergs here—Rifka, Liuba, Soloma—but none I knew. “Was Max buried here?” Mr. Goldenberg asked. I had no idea, so he suggested it might be worth my looking in the Jewish graveyard. “We have our own Association for Victims of the Holocaust,” he said. “Our Holocaust here in Galatz. We are trying to account for as many as we can. We are getting new information all the time.”

  Then he fixed me with a look and said: “We have even buried soap, you know.”

  I said nothing.

  “RIF! RIF!” he exclaimed. “You have heard of that?” And he kept saying, “RIF!” again and again because I didn't understand. Then he got a photograph of a gravestone. On the stone were carved the letters R.I.F. and underneath was an inscription in Hebrew that Mr. Goldenberg translated. “Here rest the bodies of our brothers turned into R.I.F. soap by the criminal Hitlerites during the Second World War.” The letters R.I.F. stood for Reichstelle Industrielle Fett, said Mr. Goldenberg. “The Nazis called it ‘clean Jewish fat.' It was on sale here in the central market— right over there. People bought it as soap. They didn't know what they were doing, of course. After the war they gave it back to us, and we buried it, here in the graveyard.” Mr. Goldenberg's certainty notwithstanding, stories that the Nazis used fat from Jewish corpses to make soap have never been proven.

  We left the synagogue and made our way up to the Jewish graveyard, high above the town. The graveyard looked down over the Sidex steelworks. An old crippled woman, dressed in rags, struggled to unlock the padlock on the gate. Yes, she said, she thought she had a Rosenberg gravestone here, but she didn't know where to find it.

  There were grand avenues of graves, all overgrown, and we walked up and down reading all the names we could manage before it got too dark. Below us orange flames from one corner of the Sidex plant were now lighting up the contours of that hideous creation and marking out the clean black lines of the delta.

  11.

  Crasna

  It was quite possible we might not be allowed across the Ukrainian border, Ion announced the next morning as we left Galatz behind. He had been unable to get his passport renewed in time for our journey, though an official had told him he might be able to negotiate a day pass at the border. I said we would talk them into it. Ion shrugged. “If we get un type soviétique, we have no chance.”

  Of all th
e places in her life, Vera had well and truly closed the book on Crasna.

  It was only thanks to Annie Samuelli that I had heard the name at all, though Uncle Siegfried also mentioned Max's “6,000-acre estate” but without giving any clue as to where it was. With the package from Canada, however, I had also received a photograph album that included pictures of Vera at a large, elegant house. One showed Vera as a child with long blond plaits cradling a dog in front of a large stable; others as a young woman striking poses on a veranda. But again, there was nothing to say where the house was.

  “Krasno” is the Russian form of “Crasna,” and “Illshi” is the name of one of the old boyar, or noble, families who owned the land around this part of northern Bukovina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Northern Bukovina changed hands several times in the twentieth century. In the early years of the century it was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but with the empire's dissolution at the end of the First World War, it was given to Romania. Then in June 1940, when Germany, the Soviet Union, and Hungary were all vying for slices of Romania, northern Bukovina was taken by the Soviet Union. Today northern Bukovina is in Ukraine.

  While it was almost impossible for Jews in Romania to own land in the early years of the century, on these isolated eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a wealthy German Jew might gain acceptance as a landowner. And it was when Crasna was part of Austria-Hungary that Max purchased the estate, paying for it with the riches accumulated in Galatz.

  Acquiring the estate at Crasna must have been the achievement of a lifetime for Max Rosenberg. He had become a boyar himself—a feudal landowner and a de facto nobleman. And yet no sooner had he bought the place than he was forced to abandon it for several years, because in 1914 he was called up to fight for Germany.

  Vera's earliest memory, or at least the earliest she ever avowed, was of the outbreak of the First World War. It was another story she told only to her Home Office interviewer. Vera was six when war broke out in the summer of 1914. At the time her family, apparently oblivious to the possibility of war, were planning a holiday on the Dutch coast, a good place for the various branches of this cosmopolitan tribe to come together.

  While Max stayed behind in Romania, or perhaps at Crasna, Vera, her mother, and Wilfred, then just three, travelled west from Galatz, taking the train to Berlin. The idea, Vera said, was to break the journey in Berlin, where Ralph, who had been brought over from his English prep school, was to join them for the last leg.

  Taking up the narrative, the immigration officer then wrote: “Miss Atkins says that her family had just arrived in Berlin when the outbreak of war was announced,” but his dry tone quite failed to disguise what must have been the panic of that moment: Hilda and her young family stepped off the Orient Express in Berlin in early August 1914, looking forward to a family holiday, only to hear the news that their entire world had fallen apart and all the Great Powers were at war. No longer could Hilda continue west to Holland; nor could she return easily to the east, as armies would be gathering in that direction.

  Her mother's horror at her position must have made an impression on six-year-old Vera. For on top of everything, Hilda now found she was physically trapped in Germany, which for her was the enemy. Her sister May and her husband Anthony were already ensconced in England, in a new house they had bought on the Sussex coast at Winchelsea. Two of her brothers, Montague and Arthur Atkins, were volunteering to fight for the Imperial forces, and May would soon be working for British postal censorship. Yet Hilda's German husband and his brothers were sure to be called up to fight for Germany, where she would now have to stay for the duration of the war.

  Her only recourse was to take refuge with her husband's German relatives, and she continued on to Cologne. The immigration interviewer, summarising Vera's words, put it like this: “The outbreak of war naturally changed their plans, and they then travelled to Cologne to join her father's parents and remained there throughout the war.”

  Stories about wartime in Cologne circulated among the family in later years. Ralph joked about how his mother used to hang a Union Jack in his bedroom in case he should forget whose side he was really on. Wilfrid, presented with swede to eat in Cornwall, protested that it reminded him of the gruel they lived on in wartime Cologne. Hilda's children had the company of their cousins, Gert and Klaus, also growing up in Cologne, and saw as much as possible of their cousins Trude, Aenne, and Hilde, daughters of Max's sister Bertha, who lived in Hanover. But they saw almost nothing of their father, who was now serving on the Eastern Front. Of the Rosenberg brothers, Uncle Siegfried recorded, at least two won the Iron Cross in the First World War.

  For Hilda this was a miserable period, as Vera's immigration officer's report confirmed: “Miss Atkins told me that although she was only a child at the time she remembers the unhappy atmosphere of strain in the house, where her father's people naturally had the German point of view and her mother, an Englishwoman, had quite other sympathies. Later they left the grandparents and went to live on their own in Cologne, where they were taught by a governess who was a refugee from Belgium.”

  Ion said we were now closing in on Romania's border with Ukraine. Everyone was wearing peaked woolly hats. Horses and carts outnumbered cars, and giant rusty pipes curled up out of fields and over roads. The first dirty snow appeared on the roadside, and we passed tourist signs for painted monasteries.

  Suddenly I couldn't see anything but thick fog, wet on my face. We had been talking so much we hadn't noticed the steam rise from under our feet. Ion pulled up. We both jumped out, and he lifted the bonnet. The car was boiling over. Geese squawked at us. My greatest fear now was that the Mercedes wasn't going to make it to the border, but Ion said he had driven across the whole of Europe when Ceausilaescu fell. The Merc wouldn't let us down.

  By dusk we had reached Radautz, a town right on the border, and we decided to try our luck with Ion's papers first thing in the morning.

  I asked Ion if he thought there was any chance we would find the Rosenbergs' house. He said he thought it unlikely but not impossible. A few of the grander houses had been used by the Communists as schools or sanatoria, and today some old families from la belle époque were even trying to get their houses back. Ion himself was one of them. “We are called nostalgiques,” he said. Vera was not a nostalgic, I replied.

  Why Vera's father and her two uncles had chosen to return to Romania after the First World War was not at first clear from Siegfried's memoir. Much of what the brothers had built up here before the war had now been destroyed—the shipyards on the Danube and the timber mills were all obliterated.

  For Max, returning here meant starting again from nothing at the age of nearly fifty. Perhaps he had simply fallen in love with the place, and looking from my tiny hotel bedroom across the undulating forested landscape, framed by snow-tipped mountains, it was easy to see why. Crasna was now only about twenty-five miles away.

  The next morning we found the frontier policeman at Radautz sitting at a desk inside a wooden box, his bullet-shaped head bent over a large, filthy ledger, a big thumb tracing down a line as he laboriously filled in numbers, names, and dates in columns.

  Another uniformed figure was slowly tearing off little slips of paper with serrated edges and giving them to people in a long queue.

  Our man looked up eventually. He looked at Ion. Ion said something, and the man stared hard at me, then jerked his chin at Ion as if to say: Why are you wasting my time? Ion showed his papers and explained what we wanted, but the answer was niet. We had landed un type soviétique.

  Not only was it impossible for Ion to get a day pass at this border, the man said, but I could not pass into Ukraine here, even with a visa. Crossing at this post was only for locals. We would have to go to the main north-south border post, at nearby Siret, and even then Ion would not be allowed across. I would have to go alone.

  Trucks were lined up on the tarmac at the Siret border post; they weren't moving. I was now sitt
ing in a yellow Trabant. It was unbelievably small, and I was hunched next to a man named Constantin, who wore a shiny black leather jacket, had dark-red cheeks, and smelled strongly of aftershave. Outside the temperature was plummeting, and a storm from Siberia was forecast.

  Ion and I had found Constantin in the car park at the border, and I agreed to pay him fifty dollars to take me to Krasno'illshi. He told Ion that he knew exactly where it was and that he spoke French. Ion and I exchanged mobile telephone numbers. He insisted I be back by nightfall. Constantin was now talking to me in very fast Romanian with the odd French word thrown in, and he seemed to think I understood.

  Soon several tall Romanian border guards were standing around the car, then bending double, their large, round, flat faces staring in through the windscreen. They were all wearing long green overcoats that looked like they weighed a ton. Despite the freezing cold their sheepskin earflaps were tied up on top of their caps. Outside scores of women with children wrapped up in thick wool scarves clutched little pieces of paper with serrated edges. Contents of suitcases were tipped out and rifled through by great big hands as large Alsatians sniffed around them.

  This entire frontier, carving northern Bukovina from Romania, had been slapped down in a matter of hours in June 1940, when Russia issued an ultimatum. Families living here had to take split-second decisions that would affect their entire lives. Anyone in the north who could rushed over to the south to be in Romania before the line was drawn. Those who didn't make it were trapped in the Soviet Union. For the next fifty years members of the same families, fellow Romanians, would grow up in different countries, visiting one another occasionally by crossing this hellish checkpoint.